Friday, February 22, 2013

Caress of Twilight--chapter 19

I spent most of today feeling like I'd stumbled into a bee-hive and inhaled most of the bees. Headaches are not something new to me, but when it takes three tylenol just to function, and it doesn't even knock the pain out? Yeah, that's not good.

Bed is going to feel very nice in about another half an hour.

Now: Positive thing. Something happy and floaty to talk about. Well...uh, I get to find a new shawl pattern? Though I think that will be "modify existing pattern for pi-shawl" because, historically accurate as it is, square shawls bore me silly. Russian shawls are straight forward and easy...ish (Good pattern=minimal casting on. Russian shawls start with the bottom border and are worked all in one piece. You don't even use an actual casting-off technique at the end, you just loop the last stitches together and hide the yarn end) but, to quote Barbie, the math is hard. A good Russian shawl has three major parts--inner frame, outer frame, and central motif--and making sure that all the elements end at the right time is a headache. As for working with a traditional Shetland pattern...no. That's less "math is hard" and more "WHAT WERE THEY SMOKING IN SCOTLAND?!?" I've got three really good books on the subject, including Heirloom Knitting, which is kind of the bible on Shetland patterns, and I still can't figure out which piece you start with, let alone how you're supposed to make it all look like on thing. A pi shawl, though, is basically one big long strip of knitting that folds over onto itself.

And I like round things better than square ones, anyway.

The point of all this is, I've been spinning a really nice alpaca/wool two ply in varigated white and brown. It is SOFT. It is like dream-making soft. It's the kind of thing you want to have forever so, when you feel bad, you can bury your face in it and let the rest of the world just go away somewhere else. I just have to work out a pattern that will look good in brown.

Now. Keep that image of warm soft fluffy things firm in your mind, because this is still the worst fucking book in the universe.

Merry and Doyle are lying in bed together, all wrapped up in Doyle's hair.

Please remember that during sex they scratched each other so badly they "came to" covered in each other's blood. I've had bad scratches and cuts before. The big one was when I cut the end of my finger off with a rotary cutter and then wrapped it up in gauze...which we didn't change until the following morning. So having hair in oozing wounds is not what I'd call sexy. It's more of an OW. And if they were covered in blood...what's on the bedsheets?

And then there is an inner monologue about being "touch starved". Specifically, it says this:

Infants will die from lack of enough touch, even if every other need is met.

Leaving aside that it makes my inner editor twitch--I can't imagine what it does to other people--that's...not exactly what those studies showed. It's a lack of affection. Children need to be held because children need to feel loved and safe. I do kind of see what LKH was going for, but...no. Just no.

Also? Merry's clothes are everywhere. And she doesn't remember how they got there. And then it gets X-rated and my flight-or-fight reflex gets triggered because I don't want to read another awful sex scene and...Queen Anadais shows up through the magic mirror.

Yes. This whole chapter was dedicated to descriptions of clothes and Touch Therapy and the growing length of Doyle's penis.

And then I realized I was minimalizing child abuse/molestation/sexualization and I had to delete it.

That whole concept creeps me the fuck out. Affection does not equal sex. I had to be Ground Control (in this case, it was repeating "That's abuse" over and over until the relationship ended) for a woman who was attached to a manipulator. The sex, I was told, was great, but he would do things like accuse her of having an affair with any male she was connected with, including her father and her own children. He was using her for sex, money and financial support, and every time she tried to leave he'd get scary. Like stalker, dead roses on the porch, cars keyed, love notes, death threats.

Watching that, I'm pretty positive that the same "play dead" instinct that kicks in during sexual assault works during an abusive relationship too. It's not that the woman is in love with the SOB, it's that she thinks on a subconsious level if she doesn't go back with him, he'll kill her.

So yeah. LKH is about as responsible and well researched in her writing as a toothpick is resilient.

I love hearing about your weaving and shawl making. It's... oddly comforting. Maybe it's because I have no knowlage of either whatsoever, and you're so interested in it. Genuine enthusiasm is the best?What? There was a chapter under it? No there wasn't. Not if my ability to block out memories has anything to say about it!

I think my favorite is getting my brother going on swords. If it were anybody else it'd be scary, but he...well, you know The Princess Bride? That's him. That's all he is, that's everything he's about. So he teaches classes on swordsmanship here in town and he has a collection that includes a real folded steel Katana that you could probably shave with. He can talk about swords and edges and stances the way I talk about knitting charts, and usually with the same reaction in the audience. I don't really get it, but I'm FASCINATED.